The education system in the United States and most industrialized countries is highly structured and generally inflexible. A long-established logical process developed over many years takes the student through a myriad of commonly accepted subjects and classes to provide a set of capabilities in preparation for adult life, with associated credentials. In the common progression, the student enters pre-school or grade school and then advances to middle school or junior high school. In most jurisdictions, the grade school through middle school process, i.e., typically grades 1-8, takes about eight years.
Today, students are typically exposed to history, geography, natural sciences, English, mathematics, art, music as well as other subjects to prepare for their secondary schooling years. In secondary schools, the students take similar classes at a more advanced level to prepare for post-secondary education. The students are typically exposed to the traditional secondary curriculum in grades 9-12, which typically takes four years to complete.
From secondary school, many students attend post-secondary school(s), either by enrolling in a vocational-technical career college, a four year college or university, or by attending a community college for one or two years and then in some cases transferring to a four year college or university. The post-secondary setting will typically have some general coursework required of all students, e.g., English, humanities, social science, and basic college math and natural sciences, which is typically referred to as “general education”. The post-secondary student relatively quickly engages in the course work specific to their selected degree program. By the second half of the post-secondary program, the student is typically heavily immersed in their chosen academic discipline and their primary field or program of study, in other words, major field of study or program of study, termed a “major” at the undergraduate level. The student can then continue on to graduate school, typically to receive a master's degree in a primary field or program of study, which is indicated by the degree name, e.g., a Master's in Business Administration, or MBA. If the student continues even further, the student can receive a more advanced, doctoral degree.
Traditionally, the student can also qualify to receive an additional undergraduate credential, typically termed a minor and sometimes a concentration, to reflect additional learning in a second discipline area, though not as extensive learning as required for a major. In some cases, the student can also be able to add more specific learning to the major or master's primary program of study, which can be termed a concentration, specialization, or similar terminology. In all of these cases, the institution requires that the student take particular courses, in order to qualify for an institutional credential. In some cases, courses transferred from other institutions can be used to satisfy these requirements, but generally only if these transferred courses cover fundamentally the same content as the institution's comparable courses, i.e., the transferred courses are “course equivalents” to the institution's courses.
These traditional degrees, which dominate academia in the United States, are based on using courses as building blocks of degrees, and course credits associated with each course to calculate how much each course counts toward the total credits needed for the degree. Content to be used toward an academic credential is counted and assessed, in so far as the course description (and associated course number, number of credits, etc.) satisfies itemized academic requirements, typically summarized by course title and number. Students can also in some cases take independent study, (honors) research, directed reading, capstone, portfolio or other courses, in which the key content is typically defined and contracted to between the instructor and the student. This current status quo, the prior art, is referred to in this patent disclosure as a course-centric model.
In addition, it can be expensive and in many cases cost prohibitive, even with aggregated national demand online, to develop a separate undergraduate major or graduate program, or even a separate pre-set concentration or specialization, for each possible subject area of interest to students.
Over the last three decades, in particular, more and more working adults have returned to college to complete their undergraduate degree or to earn a graduate degree. Institutions offering programs to working adult students have found that the most effective programs for these students involve engaging students in their studies by showing how what the student is learning applies to his or her own life. In other words, programs for working adults typically involve focusing heavily on application of theory to practice, more than abstract theories and concepts alone with minimal real-life application. Since working adult students typically have significantly more “real-world” experience than traditional students with limited or no work experience who have progressed directly from high school to college, working adults have significant prior experiential learning of their own, which they bring in to the program, and use as they participate in course assignments. These working adult, real-world application-oriented educational practices are supported by widely accepted adult learning and adult development theory, sometimes referred to as andragogy (analogous to how pedagogy is based on child development theory), such as articulated by Malcolm Knowles.
Much of the application of theory to practice is generated by the student him/herself. This individually applied learning is demonstrated by the student for the instructor's assessment through essays, classroom or online discussions, tests, presentations, other, projects, and in other ways, in which the student typically proves that he/she has learned, by relating the course's theoretical concepts to the student's career and personal interests. For example, the student can take a course in English composition, and write an essay in the form of a business memo related to his/her workplace. The student can take a course in history or economics, and discuss his/her industry's role in the development of the American economy. The student can take a course in marketing, and discuss how his/her employer could improve the marketing of their services. The student can take a course in finance, and analyze his/her employer's financial statements.
In other words, the student generates his or her own individualized content, typically related to the student's current or future work, as part of taking the course and providing material to be assessed by the instructor. Yet even though, in the course of an undergraduate or graduate academic program, the student can generate large amounts of individualized content with an emphasis on a particular area, such as an industry, job function, and/or other area of emphasis, throughout a large number of courses that the student takes during the academic program, this student-generated content is not acknowledged distinctly in existing prior art academic credentials. Instead, even a student with a large amount of individualized content with a particular emphasis, which can be dramatically different from the emphasis of the individualized content generated by peer students taking the same courses, receives exactly the same academic credential as other students taking the same courses.
Academic institutions have not developed a credential to consolidate and reference this individualized learning Instead, the academic community has continued to offer traditional named degree categories such as majors, minors, concentrations, and specializations based on standard course content as measured in whole course increments. The academic community has failed to recognize and credential the individually generated course content in highly varied subject areas within standard courses, which occurs during typical existing working adult academic programs, and which the working adult student, in particular, typically develops and submits his/herself.
Academic credentials provide significant value to students, which has helped to make higher education a $400 billion per year industry in the United States, with over 4000 regionally and nationally accredited colleges and universities. Working adult-oriented programs represent the fastest growing large segment of the higher education market, and in the future are expected to become the largest segment of the higher education market. Of the more than 18 million students enrolled in postsecondary education, approximately 25% or about 4.5 million are part-time students, of whom 80% work, and 75% or about 13.5 million are full-time students, of whom about 40% work. In addition, about half of postsecondary students are financially independent. Over 7 million individuals above 25 years of age are enrolled, and adults and students working full-time make up over 40% of undergraduate enrollments; indeed, about two-thirds of working adult students see themselves more as employees than students. Many of these working adult students are involved in academic programs structured specifically for working adults. As noted earlier, these programs tend to be very career- and application-oriented rather than covering more abstract, theoretical, and/or traditional liberal arts areas. In addition, as employment complexity increases, a combination of both broad and specific skill sets are needed by employees and their employers.